25th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Hobart 6pm Mass

Welcome to parishioners and visitors who have come to pray this evening.

There is something about today’s Gospel that gets under our skin.

The landowner goes out early in the morning and hires workers for his vineyard. He goes out again at nine, at noon, at three, and even at five o’clock, when there is hardly any working day left. Then, when evening comes, he pays them all the same wage.

And immediately something within us protests: That’s not fair.

The people who have worked all day have carried the burden and the heat. Surely, they deserve more.

And, of course, if Jesus were giving advice about industrial relations, we might have a point. But he is not. Jesus begins the parable with the words: “The kingdom of heaven is like…”

He is telling us something about God.

Isaiah, in the first reading, has already prepared us for this Gospel: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways not your ways—it is the Lord who speaks.”

We calculate. God gives.

And the wonderful thing about this evening’s parable is that the landowner keeps going out.

That is the detail I find increasingly striking. He could have sent his manager. He could have employed enough people at dawn and remained comfortably at home. Instead, he goes out again. And then he goes out again.

Finally, at the eleventh hour, he finds people still standing there.

“Why have you been standing here idle all day?”

Their answer was terribly simple: “Because no one has hired us.”

And yet, there is something rather sad in those words.

Nobody wanted us. No one chose us.

Perhaps that is the real heart of the Gospel.

These were not lazy people. They have been waiting for somebody to give them a place in the vineyard. And the landowner refuses to allow the day to end while anyone is still standing outside.

That tells us something beautiful about God.

God is relentless in seeking us. He does not look at his watch and say, “Too late.” He does not decide that someone has missed their opportunity. He keeps going out.

We as the Church must learn to do the same.

As we continue our journey towards the Synod of the Archdiocese of Hobart, one of the important questions before us is not simply what those already inside the vineyard think. We must also ask: who is still standing outside?

Who believes that nobody wants them?

Who has quietly drifted from the practice of the faith? Who has been hurt by the Church? Who wonders whether there is any place for them? Who has never really heard the Gospel presented as good news?

Here in Tasmania, we know that many people have little connection with Christian faith. It would be very easy for us to lament that fact. It would be easy to stand safely inside “the vineyard” wondering why everybody else has not come in.

But that is not what the landowner does.

He goes out.

And perhaps that is part of the conversion Christ is asking of us. The Church cannot simply wait for people to find their way through our doors. We have to become more like the God revealed in this parable: always looking outward, always searching, never deciding that somebody is too late for grace.

There is another side to the parable.

Those who arrived first became resentful. They were not angry because they had been treated unjustly. They received exactly what had been promised. They were angry because the landowner had been generous to somebody else.

This can happen in the spiritual life.

We can become so accustomed to grace that we begin to imagine that we have earned it.

None of us has earned the love of God.

The person who has prayed faithfully for seventy years and the person who walks into a church hardly knowing why they came both stand before God as beggars before grace.

Perhaps someone has come here tonight carrying years of faith. Perhaps someone else is returning after years away. Perhaps somebody is struggling and is not even certain what they believe anymore.

The Gospel says to each one: there is a place for you in the vineyard of the Lord.

And in tonight’s second reading we heard that St Paul discovered something the workers who complained had forgotten. The privilege is not merely receiving the denarius at the end of the day. The privilege is being in the vineyard at all.

To know Christ, to belong to him, to spend our lives in his service: this is already grace.

At the end of the parable, the landowner asks the grumbling worker: “Why be envious because I am generous?”

Perhaps we might turn that question around tonight.

Why not rejoice because God is generous?

Why not rejoice that there is still room in his vineyard?

Why not rejoice that even at the eleventh hour the Lord is still looking for the person whom everybody else has overlooked?

And perhaps the deepest challenge of this Gospel is that Christ now asks us to go out with him.

There are still people standing outside.

The day is getting late.

And God has not stopped looking for them.

Most Rev. Anthony J. Ireland
Archbishop of Hobart
20 September 2026